Beer of Tomorrow

Just in time for the weekend, Filling Stations is a weekly post that highlights one of Los Angeles’ destinations for craft beer, be it a bottle-shop with a great selection, a restaurant with great food to go with their beer list, or a bar serving excellent beers.

Bills Liquor

Angelenos know that often the best gems in our city are hidden in dingy strip-malls behind run-down facades. Atwater Village’s Bill’s Liquor looks like any of the hundreds of bodegas and corner stores in the city, but its coolers house a fantastic collection of craft beer selected and watched-over by a caring owner who is actively trying to be the craft beer destination in his neighborhood.

Bill’s is on Glendale Blvd between The 5 and San Fernando, and they’ve got a great selection of bombers and 6-packs. While you can’t break any six-pack for singles, you can create a custom six-pack for about $10 from the dedicated collection (which takes up the majority of one whole cooler) of single 12-oz bottles. They carry a full line of Stone beers, and Bill’s is a great place to find the limited edition releases and collaborations. They also pride themselves in stocking Russian River beers, and we’ve often seen Pliny, Blind Pig, and the seasonal releases available.

The craft beer is no after-thought at Bill’s, and the selection has expanded in recent months with more of the stuff that the LA beer geek is looking for. Piles of hype-generating brews like Brux and Parabola, plus a full-complement of LA’s local beer options from Eagle Rock and Golden Road fill-out the stock. We’ve also spied the three-liter bottles of Stone special brews from time-to-time, and one of these day’s we are going to break-down and buy one!

The owner and his employees are extremely helpful and will happily go out of their way to help you find the right bottle. It is clear that they care about their customers satisfaction, and it goes a long way towards our strong recommendation for Bill’s. They limit the rare stuff to a bottle-or-two per person, which we think is a great way to help more people find and enjoy the popular stuff.

Prices at Bill’s range from reasonable for the hard-to-find beers, to average on most of the selection, to some good deals on over-stocked items & special buys.

While Bill’s Liquor is not in our neighborhood, we wish that it was! We always find something to fit our mood when we visit Bill’s.

[...] Stone 16th Anniversary IPA. But the $20 was burning a hole in my pocket and I had just learned via Beer of Tomorrow that a liquor store near me stocked craft beer so I headed to Bill’s Liquor in Atwater [...]

[...] Store | This gem, tucked away in Atwater, is easy to pass up. (Hat tip to my friend John Verive at BeerOfTomorrow.com for recommending it!) Besides having a well curated selection, there’s also a large selection of [...]

[...] Store | This gem, tucked away in Atwater, is easy to pass up. (Hat tip to my friend John Verive at BeerOfTomorrow.com for recommending it!) Besides having a well curated selection, there’s also a large selection [...]